This review may contain spoilers
good concept lousy and rushed execution
As a premise, this drama was very promising , but alas the execution was lousy, the story began to go all over the place, weird pacing, rushed conclusions to some story arcs, and even inconsistencies with some of the flashback events.
The drama opens to an intriguing mystery with a touch of fantasy and horror elements. The story then offers the familiar yet promising aspect of second guessing and doubting whether our main lead is an imposter who is deceiving everyone, or is he/ might be genuine. Was he a tormented soul that is good at heart, or is he simply a conniving evil person. If executed well such a tool be highly advantageous to building a mystery thriller, where a degree of doubting the true intentions or nature of a character gives extra depth to the story, keeping us watching doubting each and every word or action they take, always in anticipation of the moment the truth comes out. This drama even added an extra layer to that mystery; our main male lead might be truly the person he believes he is conning people into thinking that he is. That premise was good on paper, but unfortunately I have to say I felt the execution was somewhat sloppy and riddled with question marks, and the reveal was eventually rather anticlimactic.
The romance was poorly done. The Enemies-to-lovers card was just so rushed we were not shown enough to be bought on their love story, a couple of swoon-worthy moments or a couple of heroic actions can not make the viewer believe how she could shift one moment from despising and doubting him to all of a sudden falling madly in love with him. And I want to stress, that the issue with the romance was not owing to lack of acting skills or chemistry between the actors, rather it was just an issue with writing and script itself, it felt like the writer just decided at one point maybe due to time constraints with the air time and the progress of the story to just advance the romance to the next level.
Now, addressing the elephant in the room, which was the faux-incest aspect of the romance plot. I'll put it this way, showing us signs of attraction between the main leads at a point when we were still highly doubtful whether or not he was her brother was one thing, but when there is outright flirtatious skin-ship AFTER he supposedly convinced her he was her long lost brother that is a totally different thing. Let's just say that was a bit too much for me.
As for the pacing of the story, the drama wasted a large chunk of its short airing time on the "guild" power struggles or whatever that was, which to put it bluntly was boring and never managed to interest me as a viewer. I never really managed to wrap my head around what the whole guild and stake thing to begin with. and I felt like even the writers were being indecisive as to how much they wanted to build this story, they were always hinting at things like the gift of deed or whatever but never properly explaining anything. And even after we were introduced to the backstory of our lead and his motivations to approaching the guild master, the writers managed time and time again to lose the viewers attention toward the main mystery that our main lead was risking his life to uncover (i.e. the painter and his snow man), and left us trying our best to follow the inner machinations of the power struggle between the husband and wife fighting over control of their precious guild, and we were only ever introduced to their background story too little too late. It is hard to be interested in a plot that involves characters that we were not properly introduced to, with just one quick rushed scene to give you the gist of their background story. That may cut it if it was just a side character with a side plot that didn't consume most of the drama, but here at least one third of the story was about the god da*n thing! They managed to lose my interest completely to the point that whenever there was a part where different factions sent their henchmen to hunt down our leads which tended to happen a lot, I couldn't care less to recognize who was on which faction's side and who was fighting who, I was like whatever just get it over with. I found myself a couple of times literally checking how many episodes were left, and wondering when will the story address the mystery of the painter already, or just focus on our main lead's story.
The ending was super rushed, and I do not think that the shorter format was purely to blame, the story with its different plots could have progressed with a different pace and more balanced way so as to give more time for the main plot to progress without feeling it was just haphazardly executed like that.
Like many people mentioned on here, the OST was nice and memorable, the main song gave Indian vibes with dark and ritualistic sounding vocals I felt matched the story.
If you're a huge fan of the actors, it would not hurt to check it out, other than that I would not recommend this drama.
The drama opens to an intriguing mystery with a touch of fantasy and horror elements. The story then offers the familiar yet promising aspect of second guessing and doubting whether our main lead is an imposter who is deceiving everyone, or is he/ might be genuine. Was he a tormented soul that is good at heart, or is he simply a conniving evil person. If executed well such a tool be highly advantageous to building a mystery thriller, where a degree of doubting the true intentions or nature of a character gives extra depth to the story, keeping us watching doubting each and every word or action they take, always in anticipation of the moment the truth comes out. This drama even added an extra layer to that mystery; our main male lead might be truly the person he believes he is conning people into thinking that he is. That premise was good on paper, but unfortunately I have to say I felt the execution was somewhat sloppy and riddled with question marks, and the reveal was eventually rather anticlimactic.
The romance was poorly done. The Enemies-to-lovers card was just so rushed we were not shown enough to be bought on their love story, a couple of swoon-worthy moments or a couple of heroic actions can not make the viewer believe how she could shift one moment from despising and doubting him to all of a sudden falling madly in love with him. And I want to stress, that the issue with the romance was not owing to lack of acting skills or chemistry between the actors, rather it was just an issue with writing and script itself, it felt like the writer just decided at one point maybe due to time constraints with the air time and the progress of the story to just advance the romance to the next level.
Now, addressing the elephant in the room, which was the faux-incest aspect of the romance plot. I'll put it this way, showing us signs of attraction between the main leads at a point when we were still highly doubtful whether or not he was her brother was one thing, but when there is outright flirtatious skin-ship AFTER he supposedly convinced her he was her long lost brother that is a totally different thing. Let's just say that was a bit too much for me.
As for the pacing of the story, the drama wasted a large chunk of its short airing time on the "guild" power struggles or whatever that was, which to put it bluntly was boring and never managed to interest me as a viewer. I never really managed to wrap my head around what the whole guild and stake thing to begin with. and I felt like even the writers were being indecisive as to how much they wanted to build this story, they were always hinting at things like the gift of deed or whatever but never properly explaining anything. And even after we were introduced to the backstory of our lead and his motivations to approaching the guild master, the writers managed time and time again to lose the viewers attention toward the main mystery that our main lead was risking his life to uncover (i.e. the painter and his snow man), and left us trying our best to follow the inner machinations of the power struggle between the husband and wife fighting over control of their precious guild, and we were only ever introduced to their background story too little too late. It is hard to be interested in a plot that involves characters that we were not properly introduced to, with just one quick rushed scene to give you the gist of their background story. That may cut it if it was just a side character with a side plot that didn't consume most of the drama, but here at least one third of the story was about the god da*n thing! They managed to lose my interest completely to the point that whenever there was a part where different factions sent their henchmen to hunt down our leads which tended to happen a lot, I couldn't care less to recognize who was on which faction's side and who was fighting who, I was like whatever just get it over with. I found myself a couple of times literally checking how many episodes were left, and wondering when will the story address the mystery of the painter already, or just focus on our main lead's story.
The ending was super rushed, and I do not think that the shorter format was purely to blame, the story with its different plots could have progressed with a different pace and more balanced way so as to give more time for the main plot to progress without feeling it was just haphazardly executed like that.
Like many people mentioned on here, the OST was nice and memorable, the main song gave Indian vibes with dark and ritualistic sounding vocals I felt matched the story.
If you're a huge fan of the actors, it would not hurt to check it out, other than that I would not recommend this drama.
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